Test kitchens may spring up for new food businesses

Rob Varnon

Published 10:38 pm, Monday, December 10, 2012

NEW HAVEN -- The city and Gateway Community College have cooked up a plan to start a culinary incubator that could eventually make use of dormant corporate kitchens across the region.

On Monday, Michael Piscatelli, New Haven's deputy economic development administrator, joined with consultants from Boston-based Next Street to discuss a plan to use Gateway Community College's Sargent Street kitchen as a space for caterers, food truck vendors and manufacturers.

"We're about six to nine months from go/no-go stage," Piscatelli told about 50 people who attended a meeting about the potential program.

Culinary incubators provide space for people whose businesses have grown beyond the capacity of their home ovens. A large industrial kitchen is rented out to multiple users who pay membership and other fees, like storage, to use the space, allowing them a transitional location before they expand to having their own restaurant or storefront.

The Sargent Street kitchen was freed up when Gateway opened its new facility in downtown New Haven this year.

Piscatelli said the idea was born about a year ago when the school and city realized it had this space. For now, it's still just an idea, as more research has to be done to determine whether the facility makes sense in one of Connecticut's premiere cities for dining.

So far, New Haven has brought in a consultant to do some prep work and find out what kind of market there is for this type of program.

The initial assessment by Next Street analyzed the kitchen space and other programs nationally to try to determine what would work best on Sargent Drive.

Trevor Brown, a Next Street director working out of the company's New York City office, said the space seems conducive to caterers, small-run bakers including those making cookies, food truck operators who need a prep kitchen and more established businesses looking for test kitchen space.

He said other cities have converted former corporate kitchens for this type of use, pointing to Pfizer's former Brooklyn site as an example.

What has to be determined in New Haven is how much to charge for the space and whether it can be economically viable at that price, he said.

Brown said the model they're proposing would charge a monthly or yearly membership fee, which would include training on machinery and safety. People would also be charged a storage fee if they keep anything in the freezer or in dry storage, and they might have to purchase hours.

Piscatelli said a basic fee structure is being discussed, but has not been set. The group plans to have more discussions with members of the community as they move forward on launching, or scrubbing the idea.

Overall, Jon Aram, also with Next Street, said the kitchen and community, with its network of existing food-based industries, looks promising. And the idea has an important driver behind it as well, he said: "People have to eat."